Tanya's stomach grumbled. This soup and kasha stuff, it wasn't healthy thinking. Not if you were trying to reduce, as Tanya was trying to. All this for a bid to work for Aeroflot, which was hiring flight crew for the riskier southern and eastern routes like the Perm—Krasnodar and Perm—Vladivostok, the same routes younger, better-looking girls with brighter prospects were now giving up. Imagine—trading the dim belly of the museum for the sharp and vertical blues of sky! Imagine—exchanging her sensible shoes for high-heeled pumps and skating on a silver sea of clouds! 'Imagine!' Head Recruiter Aitmotova, a tiny woman with platinum-blonde hair and highly parabolic eyebrows, said a few weeks ago when Tanya meekly eyed the bright glossies and application form. 'Down-at-heel Aeroflot is renovating its entire fleet.' Head Recruiter Aitmotova shoved an application form into Tanya's hand and plied Tanya with figures, facts and stories of workers repairing cracked wings and faulty electrical circuits. Gone the old colours, gone the bland white bellies and baby-blue wings, for the crisper, brisker blues and oranges. Gone the traditional meal service, which began and ended with a single cup of water and a wet wipe. And gone their old slogan: 'We don't smile, because we're serious about making you happy.'
As Head Recruiter Aitmotova talked and talked, Tanya shifted her weight from one foot to the other. Living as she did so near a newspaper translator, she had learned through the thinness of the walls and the conductive nature of the open heating pipes a few things. Facts. Aeroflot had earned a long and thoroughly established reputation of aviation disaster, planes dropping right and left out of the sky to land in the great boggy flats of Siberia.
Head Recruiter Aitmotova raised her hand slowly and nodded knowingly. 'You are wondering about safety. Everybody does at some point. And I can assure you that even now our very own Aviamotor mechanics are working around the clock to overhaul the old engines. Moreover, engineers have installed black boxes so that if—and this is highly conjectural—a plane should fall, investigators will know why.' Head Recruiter Aitmotova smiled. 'It's progress; you can't stand in the way of it.'
All this the woman had said in a rolling cadence that itself could not be stopped, not by Tanya's quiet doubt, low self-esteem or complete lack of funds. 'Just fill in the application form, dear,' Head Recruiter Aitmotova said, a benediction of practical measures. 'Be focused on your dreams. And lose some weight.'
Dream. She could do that. Staring out the narrow window, Tanya imagined the taste of cloud, swallowing every fluffy hope, consuming and digesting and rising, rising beyond body, beyond reason. Her trouble: she did not yet possess a fully inflatable super-buoyant self-esteem. A theme song would help. Supersonic anti-gravity jump boots. Coiled springs. Wax wings. A flight manual. But she was straying off-topic: a bad habit of hers and the reason why she'd been demoted from guided tours in the first place.
She blamed her sudden deflated status on the oversized painting of Yermak Timofeyevich in the blue room. Who could think straight with that madman foraging across the thick layers of cheap industrial-grade paint? Heavy with winter blues, browns, and flat winter light, Yermak leads a band of Cossacks through a river. They are hacking their way through the line of Tatar defenders. The long creases on his forehead suggest a lifetime of weariness, of hunger, but the look in his eye is of wild joy. All this in spite of the heavy armour he wears—a gift from the mad Tsar. Would he have still worn that armour if he had known that some day its weight would drag him to the bottom of a river? Is he pleased to know that even now on certain days columns of fire shoot out of the river at the very spot his bones are pinned to the riverbed? These were the questions Tanya made the mistake of voicing aloud. And in front of a group of schoolchildren.
This must be why the painting of Yermak was so big, she'd told the children. Yermak was larger than life, daily fighting death in that large river that flowed out the bottom border, as if to show no mere frame could ever contain him. Yes, it was a big painting. Beyond big, the canvas was an immensity. It filled an entire wall in the museum. If it were to fall, if those hooks and cables were to fail, the weight of the painting would surely pull down the wall to the waxed floor. The toppling wall would set off a chain reaction, she speculated aloud, and as each wall fell, room by room, the upper stories would collapse like an accordion folding upon the lower storeys. Yermak would drag down the entire museum all the way to the basement, burying them all.
Naturally, there were complaints. She was demoted. Her embarrassment, colossal. Worse, sitting in the basement next to boxes of rocks and other curiosities put her no closer to Yuri than before, but rather much further away. And this is what hurt her most. She, a girl made of water and air and breath, she a girl who had swallowed cloud and was now more vapour and spirit than girl, was stuck in the underlit bowels of the stagnant museum at the very bottom of the bottom of the ocean of air.
Yuri's voice and that of Zoya's, Tanya's replacement, floated down opposite sets of stairs, Yuri's from the west wing and Zoya's from the east. Even separated, through the acoustic anomalies of the All-Russia All-Cosmopolitan Museum, they managed to find each other, their words falling to the lowest point of the building, settling in the wells of Tanya's ears: Zoya discussing in her bored monotone the icons of Saints Boris and Gleb, while Yuri fielded questions from the purple room where the two pictures of Yermak opening the Siberian interior hung.
'Why does Yermak look so rabid?' The question tumbled down the staircase and fell loudly at Tanya's feet.
'Well,' Yuri coughed politely, 'he was a known river pirate. Ivan the Terrible hired him to go and act crazy in a grand proportion, an ability so natural to Cossacks, it seems a genetic certainty.'
A true interpretation. But risky. It was OK to criticize dead people, but not overly famous ones. Having spent the better part of a summer in the basement, Tanya ought to know. She studied the window, the particulate texture of lowering frost mixed with the grit and pollution. This time of year the rose and lavenders of the grainy air looked like a picture of a famous painting she'd seen in a book somewhere. Viewed up close, there were nothing but dots, hundreds upon hundreds of dots. But seen from a distance, out of the haze of dots a rolling green and a river, and a child and a woman with a red parasol slowly emerged. He must have lived in a very dirty world, that painter. But he found a way, with the point of his paintbrush and unbounded human patience, to render it beautiful. Tanya narrowed her eyes at the grainy block of sky framed in the window. Dots upon dots. She squeezed her eyes closed, then opened them suddenly. Alas, just dots. Tanya sighed. Flipped through her notebook. Took consolation in an old scribble:
Violet in early November, shirring the sightline. Day and night meet in that hue for five minutes. With their barks the dogs in their courtyards measure the lengths of their chains. Outside the city the hills burn with trash fires and the smell of outdoors creeps indoors. This is the smell of the service coat, the one you were wearing when you came home. The patch with your name burned to
a crisp and you asked me if I could tell you who you were.